


On a clear day, you can see forever

by orphan_account



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 20:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17432594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: With all the technicolor luster of his most elegant frocks, Elim Garak wove the most fabulous lies.





	On a clear day, you can see forever

**Author's Note:**

> I have walked through many lives,  
> some of them my own,  
> and I am not who I was,  
> though some principle of being  
> abides, from which I struggle  
> not to stray.
> 
> In my darkest night,  
> when the moon was covered  
> and I roamed through wreckage,  
> a nimbus-clouded voice  
> directed me:  
> “Live in the layers,  
> not on the litter.”
> 
> Though I lack the art  
> to decipher it,  
> no doubt the next chapter  
> in my book of transformations  
> is already written.  
> I am not done with my changes.
> 
> — **Stanley Kunitz** (Selected sections from **The Layers** )

Held captive in the slate and steel and stone gloom of England, most of Julian Bashir’s childhood was spent conjuring fantasies about the clandestine enterprise of escape.

Dreams that took him to the stars, to the frontier, to the desolate chrome and harsh halogen glow of the edge of the Alpha Quadrant, with its ever-sputtering, ever-spinning wheels, pylons once raised high to the glory of empire, now stood in defiance of its lust. A lone island at the edge of the galaxy, collecting its fill of exiles, fashioning itself a new Babylonia.

Earth seemed far away from his mind, and memories of England waxed and waned, like the gentle pull of a tide, a dream slowly fading at the edge of sleep.

It’s in the corner of the Replimat, under the sterile lights and the lather of chatter, over the low rumble of the life support system, scented by the clinical perfume of deodorizers, in the company of the station’s sole resident Cardassian, that Julian finds himself thinking of his childhood. It comes to him in the form of Scheherazade, weaving rich tales night after night, each word slackening the monarch’s grip on the knife poised before her, fashioning lies as plenty as there were grains of sand in the plains of Tehran.

Of course, with all the technicolor luster of his most elegant frocks, Elim Garak wove the most fabulous lies.

Today, he tells the story of an old Cardassia Prime. The sort of cautionary tale guardians told their young wards. It was during the time of the Hebitians, just before the rise of the Oralian way, not unlike the Hellenistic era of human history; a romantic, spiritual age that relished philosophy, suppressing its appetite for conquest. Its abrupt fall came when a perfectly benign coiling vine from a faraway continent was introduced to resist erosion in vulnerable settlements. Knots of restorative green with curious tendril flowers effortlessly coiled over scrubland, breathing new life as they spread. Just as the sector’s pioneers had eased into their new settlements, the treacherous vine swelled irrepressibly, sinking its teeth into emerging structures, collapsing towers, homes, thoroughfares under the weight of a viridescent assault. In the end, there lay the bones of a burgeoning new world, turned to ruin by curious things that inveigled an unsuspecting populace with alluring promises that were too good to be true.

Unlike Scheherazade, Elim Garak seems to relish the notion of provoking a knife to his throat. Julian only sets down his tea, sits back, and offers his most polite approximation of a showman’s smile.

Whether Garak means to express anger or distress is anybody’s guess. If there’s one thing that’s becoming clearer with each conversation, the irrepressible glint of mischief in his friend’s eye seems to be another mask. Just another one of the spangled trappings made to distract anybody navigating the labyrinthine theater of the Cardassian’s endless stories.

Julian knows a thing or two about misdirection. The conventions and traps are all too familiar.

Coasting the Theogonic trend of their conversation, he counters ancient myth with ancient myth. The resurrection of Osiris is a tale grotesque and impossible, as most old human stories were. Fooled and murdered into a stupor and murdered by his own brother, Osiris died with his body cut into forty-two parts, lain across the featureless wastes of Egypt. Isis, mourning Osiris, fueled by love and rage and devotion, ventured alone through the seas of sand and the maddening heat to claim each piece of his corpse and restore him anew. Bones bound tightly into cloth, guided by the hand of a long gone form of magic, Osiris came alive; from death, a rebirth. It’s the sort of story that’s taken other forms—Yeshua and the Magdalene, Hades and Persephone—the mystic restoration of a lover, a romantic cast to tell children about death and its rituals, or of the cyclical nature of seasons.

Garak pushes the food around his plate, unimpressed. “Is that the sort of lies human parents tell their children? It seems to me that fooling anyone into believing in life after death is merely prevarication.”

A Cardassian lamenting prevarication. That’s the kind of irony Julian’s gotten used to, now.

“It’s not supposed to be taken literally, Garak. People live on through other things. Legacies. Their children, their works. Sometimes people who go through radical change symbolically die a kind of inner death and live a second life. Which is kind of, in its own way, tragic but beautiful.”

A fork scrapes over a plate with a screech, like wheels grinding to a halt. 

“You _don’t_ say?”

When conversing with Elim Garak, it is often difficult to distinguish genuine enthusiasm from concealed hostility.

This is not one of those times.

Julian looks up, cranking his head and his gaze with a leadened effort, pushing against the heavy weight of instinct.

Cold blue eyes regard him with a calculating glint, shoulders straightened out, an eager grin, the proverbial knife in reverse, the slight jut of a chin, insisting: _go on_.

Let it never be said again that Julian Subatoi Bashir does not know when to hit the brakes. When it matters, at least. He shirks the sharpening edge of dread the best way he knows how, at this moment, in this corner, on this table.

“I suppose it’s noble of Cardassian families to tell their children to mistrust anything foreign instinctively?”

“As much as you’d like to think it, the point of the tale is _not_  xenophobia, my dear Doctor.” 

Julian shrugs theatrically, hands raised in surrender. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Garak sighs, posture slackening somewhat as he rests back into his seat, shaking his head slightly with that incredulous expression betrayed by a poorly suppressed smile. He launches into a winding epexegesis, of the context of the tale which includes all the familiar conventions of the growth and collapse of societies, speaking with a relaxed exuberance, dissonantly calm yet gesturing with every didactic bone in his body. 

As they sit there, in their usual corner of the Replimat, turning along the inexhaustible gyre of the station’s wheels, reveling in each other’s stories, the phantoms of their lives, and the mysteries that lie ahead, Julian considers the strange feeling that he might have finally caught up with all those boyish fantasies of escaping Earth.

For now, where he is is perfect.

Deep Space Nine will do just fine.

 

* * *

 

One day, somewhere in between their lunchtime rambling, somebody must have extended an invitation, or maybe just the implication of one. He’s not actually sure if that was clear, because Garak never is, and to be quite fair, neither is he. All he gets is that somebody must have said something, in that oblique manner of theirs.

Before Julian knows it, curtains are being thrown aside, and he's being led to the back of Garak's shop. Crossing the threshold, he'd expected some sort of profound revelation, like levers and pullies and ropes undoing a magician's tricks. Instead, there's only a table, a few empty chairs, and heavy rolls of fabric slumped against the wall.

It’s how he ends up in a plush stool, nearly sinking in it, nursing a glass of kanar, thoughts drifting once more to Earth, to stories of travelers coursing the length of the Great Steppe, passing bottles of aragh and telling tales to pass the time. Aragh was coarse, caustic, said to cause blinding headaches, cure any uncommon ills, or possess magical qualities. Historically, it was contraband, and perhaps that was why Julian was at least fond of the _idea_  of it. At sixteen, his mother poured him a glass, waxing about how it refined any meal from her native Iran. It had the fragrance of flowers and spices, and with a few drops of water, the perfectly clear drink slowly transformed into a cloudy white, turning opaque to conversely reveal its secrets. In the world of a squat glass, of what was technically just aniseed moonshine, ribbons of white danced and bloomed like old magic.

 

It tasted, however, much like ointment.

Julian raises his glass closer to inspect the blue liquid, practically afire with a chemical gleam. “This tastes a lot like something from Earth,” he mutters, swirling the drink idly. “Looks deceptively harmless, tastes like drinking synthetic perfume. First time I tried it, I thought it was poison.”

Garak’s smile is wolfish. Perhaps kanar is _actually_ poisonous.

“Rather counterintuitive to consume something presumably lethal, but I suppose it’s not surprising, given some esteemed human traditions.” The Cardassian punctuates his opprobrium with a languorous drink. “It boggles the mind how much your species seems to delight in any gesture of showing how very daring your kind can be.”

Julian holds his gaze. “Oh? And just how _daring_  do you think I am?”

Garak throws him a look, arch and suggestive, an auctioneer with his gavel at the ready.

There are moments when it feels like they’re standing just over the bluff. A small step away from free-falling into whatever this is they’ve been dancing around.

The air in the heated room thins out. In the strained stillness of it all, time seems to stretch ineffably.

The station's wheels torque along the ever-steady center.

Beads of kanar droop in rivulets down a near-empty glass.

_Ball’s in your court, Bashir._

Julian attempts to relax into his seat. “ _Cowards die many times before their deaths_ ,” he says airily, cringing a little at his own pretension.

_Score: zero._

Garak puts his fingers to his temples, as if to relieve a headache. “You’ve yet to convince me that your Shakespeare is no more than an overrated hack. Overwrought, inconsistent, prone to the most farcical sort of contrivances…”

“Well, my dear Mister Garak, human literary tradition is as vast and diverse as the stars of the Local Group. If not Shakespeare, I’m certain there’s some story out there you can’t possibly disdain wholesale.”

“Ah, more of the illustrious and daring human arts.” The Cardassian raises his glass facetiously: _Doctor, why do you even bother?_ He takes a languorous drink.“Would that I had all the kanar in the world to endure it.”

The hours wear on as they sit and drink and speak in the ornery manner that's become, in a way, their own private language.

Under coins of light stippling the dimness of the room, eyes fixed on each other, they converse circularly as if playing at a dance or a duel, all swerves and flourishes and clever ripostes, and on Garak’s part more colorful lies. Unprompted, he unspools a verbal map of the span of Kardasi’or. Its lithe structures reaching for the heavens to match a people’s collective ambition. A redshifted sky bursting with an internecine crimson and purple bruise. The aroma of fresh bitter gelat mingling with the sweet tang of rokassa in season, into the uncanny scent of gore. Smoke and dust storms rising nightly like ghosts to haunt the masses in their sleep.

Scheherazade told stories to keep herself alive. In this regard, Elim Garak is much the same.

In some of the older spy novels and movies of a strange and glamorous world that did and didn’t exist (Clancy and Fleming and swashbuckling skirmishes between Soviets and the English), agents sent secret signals and hidden messages through stories; mostly, old books and coded letters and photographs.

Julian catches all of that: the axis of an exile’s longing torquing to the guilt at his core. All Garak loved on lost was built on spilt blood. Whether he was on Deep Space Nine or back on its soil didn’t seem to matter—Cardassia seemed a strange, hostile, tormented place. For all of the Cardassian’s grandstanding and enthusing, in between the lies and myths and half-truths, Julian sussed out that unmistakable fact: Garak was simply lonely. A stranger on a station that was both Cardassian and not, speaking broken Federation Standard, constantly surrounded by reminders of his homeland’s crimes.

And Garak could not bear to speak of any of it. Hence, the stories. Hence, the layers. Hence, the lies. There’s the rub.

These are the contours of their conversations—more volleys and groundstrokes, overwrought lobs that go overhead and backhanded smacks exchanged than actual words. 

They call a zero in tennis ‘ _love'_ for ridiculous reasons.

(Not that he’d mistake prurient interest for _that_.)

But he is still here, on the proverbial court, playing perhaps for the love of the game.

 

* * *

 

One day, Julian lends his Cardassian friend another human novel. 20th Century, English (or, British-Japanese, for the pedantic), set around the Second World War of modern human history. In the story, at the sunset of his life, a butler named Stevens laments the opportunities he’s missed, carefully covering the seams of a gaping interior abyss with constructed illusions to dispel any misgivings about his loyalty to fascist masters. The hero, this humble butler, is oblivious to unrealized romances, personal losses and wrong choices. His desperation is quiet, his indifference maddening, his voice crisp and stoic and somehow as Cardassian as any human can be, by way of the ancient British Empire.

It’s not exactly the most subtle choice, as far as appealing to some sentiment lying at the bottom of that impenetrable iceberg goes, but despite Garak’s clever games, it’s not like he’s ever subtle either. 

A week later, Garak swans into their usual corner at the Replimat, flopping the data rod on the countertop in a blatant show of distaste. A dramatic gesture in place of his usual merciless assessments. He does not sit down.

Julian looks up, slowly, carefully. Guiltily. “Err…I’m guessing you didn’t like this one either?”

“I wasn’t aware that you’d also taken the duties of this station’s counselor.”

Julian has no idea how to take that, other than be vaguely insulted. “Okay well I’m sorry, Garak, but—”

Garak raises his hand in a cutting motion. “You said I’d find plenty of things I’d find _familiar_ in this one. Tell me, Doctor, what was it about this story you were so convinced I might identify with? Nazi Germany and the European aristocracy? The fictions of a man who’d carried his private agonies unaddressed and lived his entire life an unfeeling, uncaring, blind fool?” 

Julian opens his mouth to speak, but his brain sputters as it catches up.

Any attempts at interjection are sharply impeded by a small gesture that immediately makes Julian’s throat feel like it's closing up.

When Garak sits, he does it stiffly. Like there might be a land mine close by. 

“I must admit, your insistence that I read this one, that I’d _surely relate_ , primed me to regard this as no more than yet another naive attempt at psychoanalysis. What were you hoping for? Some unrealized insight—inspired by such circuitous moralizing, no less—to come to me?” There’s venom in the way Garak addresses him.

Julian only gapes. Assaulted by the headlights of this sudden interrogation, all he can manage is to choke out a defensive, “I…”

Out of the corner of his vision, he can see that they are quickly gaining an audience.

An unspoken inquiry hangs about their bubble, a veritable sword of Damocles bringing all its dread to bear. At once, all the air and sound seem to shrink out to the vacuum of space, impeded by this event horizon of Julian’s own making.

Garak must notice too: he unwinds somewhat in his seat. It only makes Julian tighten the spring coil of his mental composure. He does not blink. Garak folds his hands on the countertop in slow, measured movements. His fingers curl, squeaking over the plastisteel. His head tilts, an imperceptibly slight degree.

_Now_ Julian gets that vaguely homicidal air everybody else in the station’s always warned him about.

Cardassians are difficult; Garak, more so.

This is axiomatic, made clear on the first day they met, with those baffling unsolicited offers all covering up a spy game. There’s no way to change the subject here without seeming uncouth, so he does the other thing he’s always done. The instinctive response that’s spoiled countless tests, conversations, job talks and placement interviews, actually most social situations. Any time he’s frighteningly close to rousing suspicions or just plain playing at being cleverer than he actually is.

“I’m sorry,” Julian intones, a little pathetically.

The determined void of Garak’s expression softens, slightly. The quiet, calculating hostility falls away.

Suddenly, the air about the Replimat seems to shift; it is breathable, again. There’s the hum of that air compressor. The clamor of movement, swelling to more signs of life.

The chair legs creak over the tiled floor as someone shifts in his seat.

 Garak makes a banal inquiry about the food.

So they sit and eat and converse. Prevaricating, as is their wont.

In the timeworn tradition of men under pressure, any sincere passions were put behind a dam threatening to burst. Garak moved on, so Julian moved on. And that was that.

After all, what’s this in the face of an impending invasion at the galactic scale?

 

* * *

 

Growing up, Julian became meticulous about keeping Kukalaka’s repairs perfect; undetectable, as if the bear had always been in pristine condition, or a dermal regenerator had been run through the parts where the stuffing began to stick out. The inelegant early repairs rarely came to his attention, and on the times they gave him pause, he merely shifted the bear’s angle, or found something to place upon the shelf to obscure the little flaws that spoke of his incompetent patch-up jobs.

He negotiates the next conversations in a crablike manner, laterally traversing through-lines, or speaking without saying much at all. Their lives turn to the fulcrum of the station’s demands, pulling them into the wave of a cresting conflict, holding their attentions to the exigencies of wartime.

The lunchtimes, the stories, the conversations all turn into their own sorts of distractions. Safe, familiar lees of reliability along the alluvial plains of this fraught new landscape.

“I hadn’t realized by slice-of-life you meant cannibalism.” 

“My dear Doctor, I thought humans were fond of clever wordplay.”

Garak’s new story is an enigma tale. The kind of morality tale where all the players are merely a seam in the grand tapestry of nightmares, where to disentangle one thread unravels the guilt of each party. In the story, the vile nature of blind ambition is made more horrific by distorting metaphor, and enemies are literally consumed by those most hungry for power.

 “I find it hard to believe that stories like this aren’t censored by the Union.”

“My dear Doctor, what makes you think this one isn’t?”

Every single action plays its part in the puzzle, like a domino-slide collision. The sacking of a city a hundred years prior, to the isolation of a single soul in the present. In the Cardassian word, as in the Cardassian mind, everything falls together into a single elegant plane—the past is the present, the present is the past.

Elsewhere, the Federation cedes remote Human colonies to the Cardassian Union. Elsewhere, the Maquis begin to plant the seeds of resistance. Elsewhere, a revolt in the frontier destabilizes Cardassian leadership. Elsewhere, an alliance is formed between the Maquis and the Klingons. Elsewhere, an empire begins to crumble, turning to the Dominion in a scramble for power.

When Julian wakes up in a Dominion prison, the next day, it does not occur to him that, perhaps, the Federation might have played its part in trapping him into yet another dark and airless keep, from which escape seemed nearly impossible.

 

* * *

 

For most of Julian's life, his dreams were only of ever escape, and everything he’d done indulged that desire, and that most accursed of base passions that underlaid it. It struck him as ironic that he should one day find himself waking up imprisoned.

In the pit of isolation, time trickles into an infinite ribbon and slouches interminably toward the floor of its depthless cup. The naive zest and hubris propping up the drooping catenary of his own self-assurance begin to crumble in fatigue.

And somehow, inexplicably, like the twist of a plot, Elim Garak arrives.

It is not the heroic rescue that Julian had—during those more delirious moments, when his exhaustion swerved into madness—dreamt it would be.

He’d imagined telling Garak just that. He'd imagine Garak brushing his childish fantasies aside, telling him that real life does not work like one of his juvenile holosuite romps, but holding all the answers anyway. He’d have it all mapped out—the surprise attack, the daring escape, the getaway runabout poised just above the encampment. 

Things never quite work out the way he imagines they would.

Lying in the dark against the cold hard wall, in the company of fellow strangers in a strange place, held captive in a far-flung point in the vastness of space, they tell each other no stories, spare barely any words, exchange no more than a few fraught glances as the hours stretch.

The moment he realizes a secret—a veritable, indisputable truth about Elim Garak—had been vouchsafed him, no words are spoken. He pulls a blanket over the Cardassian and waits until he falls asleep before retreating to his own cot.

Julian turns over Tain’s dying words; the concessions, the requests, the begrudging praise. He considers the feeble arch of Garak's back, legs tucked to his chest, the shallow huffs of breath. He’d spent years examining and parsing and critiquing the ostensibly hidden codes in Garak’s words and gestures, the secret messages passed from data-rods filled with novels and poetry, all to marvel at the dark shimmer of detail and intrigue coating the surface, consumed by the allure of what he’d imagined to be a history twisting down to savage depths, focusing on the intricate fineries rather than what lay underneath.

Just when he thought he’d had Garak figured out.

As the grip of exhaustion, despair, grief, and this new swell of sympathy bear down Julian, he makes his way to the edge of Garak’s cot, placing a steady hand on his shivering shoulder.

Searching for something to say, he sifts through the fog of his thoughts, uncertain as a vagrant on the frontier, navigating the featureless sands of the desert, guided only by the faintest points of starlight.

“Garak, I hope you know that I…”

A hand comes up to meet his, threading their fingers together. Julian never gets to the end of that sentence. Instead, he grips tightly, bracing for whatever it is that comes next.

**Author's Note:**

> This was previously published before, under the same name. That old version was deleted because facts are facts, it was pretty awful.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **References**
> 
>  
> 
> Scheherazade is the framing device used for _One Thousand and One Nights_.
> 
> The old tale about Cardassia Prime is based on midwestern American myths about _kudzu._
> 
>  _Aragh Sagi_ is an actual drink. It's great with Mediterranean and Arabic food. Watering it down has the same effect as absinthe, visually.
> 
>  _"Cowards die many times before their deaths"_ is appropriated (poorly) from Julius Caesar.
> 
> The deleted version of this story mentioned _Le Carré_ and _Three Days of the Condor_ , which is a better fit for the fantasy about spies sending coded messages, but doesn't fit Julian's ideas of spies in Our Man Bashir. So, _Jack Ryan_ and _James Bond_ and _The Man from U.N.C.L.E._ , it is.
> 
> Zeroes being called _love_ in tennis because that's what keeps you on the court is a real thing, unless you're a _l'oeuf_ truther.
> 
> The story about the English butler is from _The Remains of the Day_ by Kazuo Ishiguro.
> 
> The cannibal story is a nod to _Bryan Fuller_ , creator of NBC's Hannibal and former showrunner for Star Trek: Discovery. He wrote the DS9 episode Empok Nor. Credits to _Una McCormack_ for spoonfeeding me enigma tale logic via beta canon.


End file.
